So, my wife has a new job in India. We’re leaving Dublin to have a flavour of life in the sub-continent. It was a dilemma to figure out how to fit this in with my own career.

After much deliberation, we figured that it wouldn’t really be possible to continue my current role of CTO. As well as the traditional CTO-like activities (evangelism, slideshows, strategy, whiteboard death-match), I’ve also been leading the, now quite large, development team at dotMobi. Doing that properly needs someone nearby, and not offset by five-and-a-half hours. So the CTO (aka VP Technology) role is now in the hands of a very able replacement – there’s certainly a world-class team to continue the good work in Dublin.Read the rest of this entry »

I’m making a big deal of this because, as of Thursday, I won’t be CTO at dotMobi. My wife Jayne, has landed a marketing job at a vineyard near Mumbai in India, and both of us, together with our two young children, are emigrating to live there.Read the rest of this entry »

WWW2008 in Beijing (4 years since I was there last – will I recognise it?)

MoMo Summit in Malaysia (2 years, but ditto)

There’s certainly no shortage of mobile-related shows on at at the moment. Plenty of gigs containing the words “mobile”, “web”, “2.0″ again this year. I think there are another two Spring events in London that I’ve missed from my list – and after all that I know I’m still, sadly, missing another sponsoree, Over The Air.

Secondly, things going on at dotMobi and elsewhere:

DeviceAtlas (launched last month, roaring success, 1,000 users already, yes I wrote some of the code)

…but I’ll keep it short. That I can so easily tells you everything you need to know about the show.

There’s a lot going on at the the Mobile World Congress, and of course there are lots of sub-markets and sub-industries being represented. But the thrust of the show is pure telecoms. Device and infrastructure vendors trying to wow network operators.

Everything else (in particular, hall 7, complete with porn and prayer room) is really just a side show. However important you think content provision are, you can guarantee the telecoms world doesn’t.

So, on that basis, the show was rather disappointing.

If the handsets launched were supposed to be some sort of comeback, then Cupertino will sleep easily. That side of the show was dominated by one company – who didn’t even turn up – and I thought everything else was utterly underwhelming. (At most I might see myself with an X1)

And on the network side, I’ve rather lost track. The acronyms are getting farcical. Too long for me to remember which ones are which, and which ones are actually synonyms for something else. So forgive my naive conclusion that there was little news there either.

In previous years, the implicit message from GSM was “We are the Masters of the Universe”. This year, there’s nervousness. This is an industry that knows it is about to be disrupted, but doesn’t quite know what to do about it.

On a personal note, the show was most notable for the number of virtual folks I finally got to meet: James Whatley gets special thanks for finding me a personal mobby. After days of being locked in with analysts and journalists, it was nice to come out blinking into the sun and meet people who speak my language